Public Health England wants a return to rationing

This photo shows customers lining up for sugar at an unknown location during rationing in 1943.

England is making moves to control your insides. The Indy has news for people who like food and freedom. The Government wants to monitor your shopping bags:

Public Health England (PHE) is demanding a “calorie-cap” on supermarket ready meals and fast food dishes.

Can that be enforced? Public Health England says it works so that “the healthier choice becomes the default choice”. PHE wants to order chefs to change ingredients, reduce sugar, fat and salt from dinners; or bring back rationing, albeit only for the well-fed and ‘too fat’. We’ve never had it so good, so let’s have less of it.

The suggested ruling, which may come into effect in March, would limit breakfasts to 400 calories and lunches and dinners to 600 each.

May or may not. The paper fails to say under what powers PHE can make such a ruling.

Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist at PHE, tells The Times. “This is all about things like pizzas and readymade sandwiches. We will need to set out guidelines and, I suspect, a series of calorie caps.”

So the Indy was wrong. There will be no rules. The Indy doesn’t bother to check its story, preferring to hype the news it read in another paper. Compare and contrast the Indy’s and the Times’s opening lines:

The traditional January detox when Britons stop drinking and start dieting could last all year under new government health guidelines. – Times

The ubiquity of new year diets and detoxes could extend beyond January and last all year – Indy

It’s worth looking at what PHE does. This from the ‘About’ section on its website:

ResponsibilitiesWe are responsible for:

making the public healthier and reducing differences between the health of different groups by promoting healthier lifestyles, advising government and supporting action by local government, the NHS and the public

…

We are an executive agency of the Department of Health, and a distinct organisation with operational autonomy to advise and support government, local authorities and the NHS in a professionally independent manner.

PHE can’t make rules. Buy it can try to justify it existence with a spot of PR that, as ever, tells us how to behave.